Nine Minutes
by mayhit
Summary: They turned out just to be mosquito bites.


Title: Nine Minutes

Author: Amyhit

Spoilers: Up to Requiem.

Rating: PG, but only for children who are already disturbed.

Disclaimer: If I were CC I would have killed Darin Morgan before I let him leave me.

Summary: They turned out just to be mosquito bites.

Author's Notes: Lets say this takes place after 'Without'. This is Scully unhinged – yet I really think she deserves it by this point. I'm not overusing Edgar Allen Poe references on purpose but the Neruda ones are extremely on purpose. Besides that, I'm planning to break down in tears during the epilogue, so if you want to you can go there.

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_Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own._

_Everything was inconceivably alien, it all_

_belonged to someone else, to no one._

_ – Pablo Neruda._

It's Saturday night and you're in a supermarket. Actually, for you there's nothing all that strange about it – only you're in Alexandria. Also Mulder is gone. You've come to Alexandria and you've come to Mulder's supermarket because Mulder is gone. The baskets here are blue not red. And anyway, what respectable management allows their produce to be misted at 11 PM? In the canned foods aisle you passed the Gerber section and almost puked. Maybe you should pick up a box of Dreamsicles. Maybe you shouldn't have brought your firearm to the supermarket. After all, you are responsible for where the bullets end up.

This is what happens when you back out of a longstanding date with target practice in order to wander the produce section squeezing mangoes.

The last few days have been nothing but time spent wondering when chasing yourself through a room full of deaf kids became the metaphor of your life. You're also vaguely curious when Skinner introduced his tear ducts to the idea of having a function. Anything to keep from remembering the looks Mulder gave you during that first week you spent together in Bellefleur, when you and he were autarkic and vain but whole:

Scathing – a moment when the projector's light was on your face and he thought you couldn't see; impish – when the plane bottomed out and you were busy wishing you'd relaxed more and bothered reading Tolkien like everyone else… but mostly just bored. In the Lariat, in the rain, in the autopsy bay with a camera in your face – the looks he gave you were enough to make even you feel your life was tedious.

Then he was holding a candle to your naked back and you forgot you were just a would-be doctor with a daddy complex. Everything was foreign to Mulder, even you in your cotton panties. Especially you in your cotton panties in his arms.

And now? Now Mulder's gone.

He can't even turn his arm 360 degrees to impress you, but he can vanish like Houdini himself. Which leaves you standing in his supermarket with a container of 'lite' cream cheese in your hand, remembering what two autopsies on an empty stomach feels like, and that you once woke up in Chaney Texas with your shoelaces untied.

When you met Mulder he was the strangest thing you'd ever seen, aside from maybe a cadaver with dextricardia, but even there you're tossing a coin. Now that he's gone you can finally realize Mulder was right all along: nothing is normal here, not even you – that's where the 'para' prefix comes in handy. You once slept with your professor, you once shot a snake, you were going to eat that cricket but you just couldn't afford to. You were already afraid of the things you were doing to impress Mulder.

Bill – in one of his great moments of fraternal sympathy – found out you were pregnant, found out you were alone and said, "You know, Dana, Tara says that elephants gestate for 21 months." Whatever he meant by it, you think that sounds about right. You think maybe you could have it together by then. Maybe you could stop wanting to spray paint a giant orange X on your stomach: "Mulder, investigate here."

You clench your hand and hold up a fist. Funny, that's how many days he's been gone – exactly a handful, exactly the right amount to hold. Synchronicity, is it not? You clench both hands and try not to think about what happens on the eleventh day, when there isn't enough fingers.

You buy the Dreamsicles after all, if only to induce yourself to tears later, remembering baseball. When you get to the checkouts The Flukeman is on the cover of World Weekly for the second time in a decade. Also, there's a part of Mulder still inside of you, making a child. It's the former you find easy to believe. It's the latter you'll dream about again tonight: that there's blood on your thighs and Mulder's never coming back.

It's Saturday night and you're in a supermarket. The male employee in his green and white uniform is pulling the shopping carts across the lot, because it's closing time. The female employee is awarding you Air Miles and asking if there was anything you wanted that you couldn't find. You couldn't find Mulder, not even in the magazine aisle. Not even standing in the magazine aisle staring up at the Penthouse issue, alone.

"No," you say, "I'm fine."

Your pregnancy-induced narcolepsy would have been enough to drive Edgar Allen Poe to write A Premature Burial and you shouldn't be driving but you take the highway doing a rebellious five over the limit. You shouldn't have kissed Mulder in a hospital either, and you shouldn't have smiled when he said he was Steven Spielberg.

All you can think now is that the first thing you ever lost was nine minutes, and how the hell were you to know the cost would be so high when they turned out just to be mosquito bites? You guess you always did let empathy get the better of you. Hot lead burnt the earth around your knees – your brothers shouted at you to get out of the way but you wouldn't. You knelt and held the small body, all spine, even though the snake was already dead.

Mulder took you to his bed for the first time only a handful of days after you met him. There he told you about his sister. Now Mulder is gone. It's the epitome of unconditional love: he came and he brought his monsters. You guess the epitome of anything was bound to hurt this much. Then he left. He left his monsters. He left you as one of them.

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Fin.

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Epilogue Notes: So this is the send off. This is what I needed to do before I could bear to watch the final two seasons. I now own them and they are waiting for me but I wasn't ready. This is not me being melodramatic, this is me perfectly serious. I am in love with this show. I have been given the impression that it is about to go and break my heart and in some small way I needed to find my own closure, before CC's answer to things came along and messed with my head. I had never really grieved for these two in the way they deserved – they lost so much. I needed to try to grok that. And, as usually happens, I was also just so damn tired and unable to sleep. Feed me back, whatever the verdict.


End file.
